This course presents some important vignettes of a complex, highly diverse India that is also witnessing unprecedented changes since its formal independence in 1947 from Great Britain. The lectures revolve around social dimensions of change, the continuing influence of ancient texts on contemporary India, political democracy, economic transition from the state to the market, gender relations, India's economic globalisation and changing world view.
While one of the objectives is to capture the multifaceted process of change, the course also critically examines some of the tensions inherent in these changes. For example, how does gender inequality play itself out in a changing Indian society, how do the modernist conceptions of art entailing market valuation challenge the more socio-centric values found in South India, what are the politics linguistic identities, and how might India address its myriad development challenges such as poverty and unemployment.
No specific prior knowledge is required. However, it would be helpful if students are aware of the socio political dynamics at play in contemporary India and keep themselves abreast with current affairs and debates in the country to fully appreciate the various dimensions and contours if the subject matter in the course.
This course is taught in English.
View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/hx8mhxb

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From the lesson

Women, gender and feminist struggles in India

This week you will be introduced to some of the concerns related to women and the politics of gender in contemporary India. The section will also focus on some of the key issues related to feminist struggle over the last three decades. Not only will it touch upon the achievements of these struggles but also deal with issues related to missing women, low sex-ratio of women compared to men in India, violence against women, the demand for representation in legislative bodes and the struggle for the rights of sexual minorities. The theme of gender justice and how it is articulated in various forums will also form an important part of this section.

Taught By

Anthony D'Costa

Professor

Transcript

Great, so we're first going to look at the positive changes as I said the successes and the achievements of women in India and I supposed the best place to begin is in looking at the constitution. The constitution was drafted by Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, and it came into force in India on the 26th of January, 1950. Now remarkably for the time, the constitution guaranteed the right to equality of all citizens. So articles 15 and 16 of the constitution prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sex but also on the grounds of religion, race, caste, place of birth or any of the above. Now, this was quite as I said, remarkable for the time. And what it meant was that women were treated as equal citizens within the constitution. However this does not preclude the state from making special provisions for women and children or other socially and educationally backward caste or classes and this exception is allowed because these groups are considered deprived and disadvantaged, historically disadvantaged in some ways. And need to be either protected or provided for. So constitutional equality goes hand-in-hand simultaneously with the allowance for special provisions for women that wouldn't necessarily be considered discriminatory. We've seen in the decades since independence several inspiring women leaders and achievers in all fields. So we have women political leaders, and we have women who are leaders in various fields whether we're talking science, whether we're talking business. To name some of the prominent women political leaders, you have Indira Gandhi, who was the prime minister of India. You have the President, Pratibha Patil, who was president of India between 2007 and 2012, you have women as chief ministers. So you have the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa. The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee. You had Mayawati, who was the youngest Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1993. And several other women who are in politics. These are just some of the key names that we can talk about. We can also point to the rising rates of literacy and education for women and girls. So for instance when we're looking at female literacy rates, the rates rose from less than 10% at the time of independence to around 65% in the 2011 census. Now, you might say 65% is still not a great figure, but if you look at how far we've come from where we started it is quite a significant achievement. Yes, there is, of course, still further to go in terms of literacy. In terms of education the millennium development goals in particular brought about a spur of increased investment in girls education. And so we've seen rapid increases in the enrolment of girls in primary school. So the net enrolment ratio between 2008 and 2012 came up to about 98% according to the UNICEF figures. Similarly, we've seen declining fertility rates. Now in the 1960s the number of children each woman had on average was around six. Now this has declined to 2.5 in the 2011 census. Now obviously, declining fertility rates are also considered a positive figure when we're looking at women. Because fewer children usually means better health for the mothers. And they're better able to care for those children as well. So declining fertility rates are often used as a proxy indicator to understand whether or not women's position has improved. We can also look at some of the key milestones that are observable in the post-Independence State. And here, where we're looking in particular at the actions of the Indian state around recognition of women's, advancement in India. So one of the first key recognitions that the state made was the enactment of the 73rd and 74th Constitutional amendments in 1991. Now, this was enacted by the Rajiv Gandhi government and it's introduced local self-governance in India. They're known as the Panchayati Raj amendments. And what was significant about this amendment was that it introduced reservations for women. At the level of local self-government where one-third of the positions in village or block level representative institutions, the Panchayats, were reserved for women. Now this was quite a landmark legislative change. It meant that over a million women pretty much overnight, became elected representatives in local and municipal governments. Now initially, there was much skepticism about the women who did get elected and there were claims that these were, these women were members of the Bahu Batey Brigade, that is the daughters-in-law and the daughters of men who were in local self-government. But that pattern while it may have been true initially, has definitely shifted over the years. Where initially, perhaps, women may have been elected because they were members of already political families and they were providing. They were acting as proxies for their husbands or their fathers or their sons who were the ones in power. Today we see a lot more women who are independent and autonomous and acting in their own right as representatives. So this was one of those major changes in the political landscape that was brought about by some progressive legislation. Another series of state sponsored programs was initiated in the 1990s. Now these programs for women's empowerment, for women's development, were initiated in part as an outcome of the advocacy of the women's movement in India. So you had for instance the Mahila Samakhya Program, which was initiated in several districts in India in Gujarat, in Bihar, in Karnataka. You had the Women's Development Program in Rajasthan. Now these were large scale programs which were mobilising women, particularly rural women, into groups into collectives and many of the activists from the women movement were part of these programs. were appointed as consultants or hired in to design these programs. So many of them were quite radical, at least in the initial stages in terms of their vision of articulating women's rights and advocating on a range of women's issues. And we'll come back to these programs a little later when I talk about violence against women, and we look at one of these programs in particular and what happens to one of the workers in this program. Now while the initial momentum of these programs was quite radical they later retreated from these, kinds of radical positions and became much more conservative and much more aligned with self-help groups and micro-credit as an intervention that would be advancing the women's cause. But, while micro-credit and self-help groups do certainly help women advance economically, to some extent, the political impetus of the early formations of Mahila Samakhya, and the WDP, the Women's Development Program got lost by the 2000 by the early sort of 21st century. I early 2001 you saw the state enacting the national policy for the empowerment of women. Now although it contains this language of empowerment of women, and certainly can be considered a key milestone for women in terms of the legislative changes brought about by, the government, this document, in effect, marked that shift , talked about, where you had a shift towards self-help groups and micro-credit, and away from a more radical politicised intervention. So this brings to a close the section where we're talking about some of the positive successes and changes that have happened. We looked at some changes that were organic, that happened over the period of the past few decades. But we've looked at some of the changes that have been brought about by specific state interventions as well. In the next section, we'll be talking about some of the less positive continuities in the ways in which women still are disadvantaged and discriminated against.

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